On a suffocating Beijing morning we boarded the
carriage, brimming with excitement. In 36 hours, we
would arrive in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia. Mongolia!
The birthplace of Chinggis Khan and the heart of the
Mongol Empire. A massive nation of less than three
million inhabitants, the majority of whom retain a
barely modernised nomadism. Our final destination was
spelled out in the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet on a
small, white slate attached to the outside of the car.
Darker, hardier Asians shouted guttural exhortations
in an unfamiliar tongue to their family members buying
instant noodles and bottled water on the station
platform. Everything reeked of adventure.

As our train cut through Beijing's sprawl, China
was waking: fishermen casting nets into the river, vendors
opening their stalls, men scaling ladders to high-rise
cranes. Everything was under construction. At
railway crossings, a horde of bicyclists waited
patiently behind a chevroned gantry for our train to
pass. Blocks of garish apartments lined the highways,
painted lemon yellow or cotton candy pink. "Beijing
has totally changed in the past few years," my friend
David told me, as we munched fiery Sichuanese cuisine,
"
not just for the [2008 Summer] Olympics, they want to
do everything now!" Hutongs, the labyrinthine
neighborhoods of old Beijing, were fast-disappearing
to make way for office buildings and residential
towers.

We had paid for a deluxe sleeper, but had no illusions
about the comfort it would provide. So we were
shocked when the tall, officious Chinese carriage
attendant led us into a roomy cabin with fold-down
beds, a writing table adjacent to the window, a shared
bathroom/shower, and a constantly replenished supply
of hot water for tea and instant noodles. Clean linen
and woolen quilts were provided in the evening, and
the attendant fastidiously cleaned and dusted the
carriage several times throughout the trip. A bright,
breezy corridor connected the cabins and led to the
adjacent dining car. This was where I met Galsan.

Galsan liked to walk topless about the carriage,
unashamed of his drooping chest or Buddha's belly.
Once, he stood at the door of his cabin in only his
briefs. He was Mongolian by birth, but now lived in
Austria; the Trans-Mongolian Express train from
Beijing to Ulaan Baatar was the final leg of a long
journey home. Like me, he enjoyed standing at the
windows of the long corridor, gazing out at the slowly
shifting landscape. And he seemed to enjoy my
persistent questions about Mongolia. "We were once so
powerful," he said mournfully, "But now we are
nothing."

A few hours north of Beijing the train entered a
long pass through the boulder-strewn mountains and trundled
past Badaling, the gleaming, reconstructed section of
the Great Wall that most tourists visit. Emerging
from a tunnel twenty minutes later, we saw the
crumbling battlements of the unrestored Wall snaking
atop ridges towards the horizon. "
Why is the Great Wall?" Galsan turned to me. Before
I could answer, he said "because of the north wind!"
and laughed mischievously. I knew what he meant.
Bands of warrior-herdsmen from the Mongolian steppes
had been harassing the Chinese for centuries; these
sporadic raids had led to the construction of several
fortified walls that would eventually (many centuries
later) be joined to form the Great Wall.
I split my time between the windows and reading a
history of the Mongols. Anyone who stayed awake in
history classes knows that the Mongols controlled the
largest empire the world has ever known, and that they
were exceptionally cruel. But cruel doesn't begin to
describe the acts of butchery and destruction that
Chingiss unleashed across Asia. Ancient cities
stretching from modern-day Iraq to Beijing were
demolished, their inhabitants massacred. The Mongols
were masters of trickery and psychological warfare. A
favorite ruse was the feigned retreat, where a
vanguard of Mongol warriors would fall back in
apparent disarray, only to have a much larger force
fall on the pursuing enemy.

Any city that put up resistance was demolished,
but surrendering without a fight was no guarantee of
clemency. Often, the surrendering citizens would be
called outside the gates for a census, only to be
mercilessly cut down. When Mongol generals learned
that some citizens were escaping death by lying down
amongst the charnel, they ordered that all be killed
by decapitation. When they learned that others were
swallowing their jewels, they ordered that all be
disemboweled. Only young people (who became slaves or
human shields), women (destined for the harems) and
artisans (who enriched the Khan's court with the
trappings of civilization) were spared. Some
historians believe that more than 16 million people
were killed during the Mongol conquest.

After debouching from the mountain passes, the train
traveled in fecund river valleys hemmed in by arid
mountains. Many of the flanks of these mountains were
viciously gouged or gone altogether, victims of the
insatiable Chinese appetite for building materials.
The whole valley was a vegetable patch, workers in
wide-brimmed hats stooped over the serried rows of
potatoes, cabbage, and carrots. In some areas, the
land had been moistened enough by irrigation, and
women walked carefully across berms separating
brilliant green rice paddies. Odd, red pyramidal
roofs that I assumed crowned distant temples were
later revealed to be the garish awnings of petrol
stations.

Apart from major cities (such as Datong, complete
with a massive nuclear power plant), the villages we passed
had begun to look more traditional, tightly packed
compounds with tiled-roof houses and small courtyards
linked by circular portals. From a distance, these
towns resembled gleaming plate armor. China's long
history is everywhere stamped on the landscape:
ancient mud brick walls, forts on every mountaintop,
decaying fortresses on riverine peninsulas, the
remains of walled cities tucked into the folds of
scree-covered hills. In some villages, the ancient
walls were still in use, the fourth side of ramshackle
compounds.

As the sun slowly dropped towards the horizon,
the landscape became drier, less populated. Just dots of
scrub on a sand sea. After a quick meal in the smoky
dining car, I looked out the window, where a row of
telephone poles had transmogrified into the
silhouettes of Calvary crosses against a blood-red
sunset.

Not long after nightfall, Erlian, the Chinese border
town, announced itself in tawdry neon signs and
glowing billboards. Across the border there was only
blackness. Once the train had come to a stop, a man
and woman in white aprons barged into our cabin. They
handed us SARS declaration forms to fill out, and then
foisted thermometers upon us. As we placed these
under our tongues, the women began to shout and
gesticulate. She wanted us to put the thermometers
under our armpits! We were both nauseated; those
thermometers were certainly reused, and we had placed
them in our mouths.

Fruit and drink vendors plied the railway station,
and I wanted to stretch my legs. In my best Chinese, I
asked the carriage attendant if I could go buy some
provisions. No problem, he replied. But no sooner
had I stepped down from the train to the platform that
the train began to pull away. My instinct was to dash
after it, but I was sure it would stop. It didn't.
My fear escalated to terror when Nori appeared behind
the carriage door, shouting and motioning to me. The
train continued to pick up speed, and then disappeared
into the night. I was panicked until I remembered
that they had to change the bogies - a three hour
process - to accomodate the different track guage in
Mongolia. I pulled out the MP3 player from my
backpack, selected the Trainspotting soundtrack, and
did my best to relax.

On the Mongolian side of the border began a maddening
series of visitations by Mongol officials, each an
hour apart, starting at 12:30 a.m. A flurry of forms;
one each for immigration, customs amd SARS. For the
last two, I just let Nori sleep and filled out her
forms - the officials didn't seem to care. In the
morning, we looked out upon a grim city with its back
to a ridge of sand dunes. This was Sain Shanda -
'Good Pond' - and we were 3-4 hours behind schedule.
A gaily painted mural on the side of the station house
proclaimed 'Visit Mongolia Year 2003,' while a dirty
urchin kicked a coffee can down a packed dirt street.
But SARS had turned Visit Mongolia Year into a
complete flop. Most visitors to Mongolia ride the
Trans-Mongolian from Beijing, and SARS had sharply
reduced the numbers of travelers to China.

Though the landscape had altered only slightly since
our final hours of daylight inside China, there was no
doubt that we had entered another country. Chinese
ideograms had vanished, replaced by the Cyrillic
alphabet; the sealed roads had dwindled to dusty
tracks, and the faces outside had changed in a way
that was instantly discerned but hard to pinpoint.
This was a landscape devoid of pretense, powerful in
its simplicity and scale. Bright beams gave the earth
a golden refulgence; only clouds cast shadows on the
uncreased immensity of the terrain. Green velvet
hillocks tossed up heavily eroded rock ridges, and
horses and Bactrian (two-humped) camels grazed
contentedly.

Once we passed a row of gers surrounded by large,
bright-orange earthmoving vehicles. I was perplexed
until I saw the wide brown swath cut through the
valley. This was the initial stage of a new highway
that would link Russia, Mongolia and China. I
suspected that funding for this massive project had
come from China or Russia; they would certainly glean
the most benefits from the undertaking, while Mongolia
would bear the environmental costs of increased road
traffic.

The conduits of civilization converge just south
of Ulaan Baatar. Tall, steel electricity pylons, only
glimpsed occasionally in the distance, now marched in
parallel with the railroad, while on both sides,
telephone poles and roads rose over hills and raced at
angles to intercept, and then surge past the train. A
towering cat's cradle of high-voltage wires stretched
between the pylons of the power generation plant.

Billboards clamored for attention. As if to remind
me that all this is not Mongolia, a dark horsemen charged
across a hill near the train, timeless in his long,
grey del (the traditional long coat) tied with a red
sash, a black bowler tilted rakishly on his head.

After the long train journey, we all stood in the
corridor, anxious to catch our first glimpse of this
improbable destination. Ulaan Baatar's setting is
beautiful, surrounded by smooth-topped mountain peaks
and with the Tuul River as its southern border. But
the disappointment was palpable as the train crawled
through a sprawling suburbia of shoddy homes and
dust-covered gers, discarded concrete slabs and rusted
freight containers. There are few fences in Mongolia;
private property generally does not exist. The
inexperience in erecting borders shows; the wood-plank
fences that surrounded these 'ger suburbs' looked the
work of madmen.

Undaunted by this dreary first impression, we stepped
down to the railway station platform full of
anticipation. It did not take long to locate Bobbi,
the proprietess of our guesthouse. "Sain baina uu?"
she asked. "Welcome to Mongolia."